The New York Times Magazine carried a great article yesterday by Ben Zimmer entitled Podium. In anticipation of the opening of the 2010 Winter Olympics, Zimmer wrote about the use of two words we will hear a lot: podium and medal. Obviously. Podium refers to the place where awards are distributed after an Olympic event and medal is the item which is being awarded. They come in either bronze, silver or gold.
But Zimmer's article identifies a new use for the two nouns. They have undergone surgery to become verbs. It turns out that it is okay now to say an Olympic athlete "medaled" and that he or she "podiumed" to receive the medal. Zimmer calls this process the act of creating denominal verbs. It turns out to be a linguistic phenomenon which has been around for quite a while.
I notice denominal verbs with somewhat of a neutral emotion. They don't bother me as much as other linguistic patterns. Remember, I'm the one who still finds himself bothered by "split infinitives" in spite of my recent discovery that there is no recognized rule forbidding their use. (Click on my previous blog, Eavesdropping....) So there are some things in linguistic use over which I get emotional. For some reason, this isn't one of them. I Google and blog right along with the rest of the world, in spite of the fact that neither of those words began its life as a verb.
As opposed to being incensed about word use (for the most part) I am amused by departures from the norm.
Yesterday, for instance, I happened upon a heated discussion between my good friend, Lee, and one of his customers. The customer was ranting at Lee about something. It turns out that he couldn't identify the root cause of the rant. A group of his co-workers had assembled to attempt to sort it out in a light-hearted respite from a very hectic surge of business. Lee said to us, "We were just conversating and everything fell apart."
Conversating? Where did that come from? We laughed about the new word he had created out of frustration. I doubt that it is a word which will be perpetuated by anyone, except to tease Lee about it when possible. There's no reason to get negative about the use of a word in an unusual and inappropriate way. It was fun.
I like the Winter Olympics, so I expect I'll be watching a lot of it in the next few weeks. I'll probably hear the words podiumed and medaled used in their newly-minted forms. I doubt that I will adopt them into my own lexicon. I was standing on the thick ice of Mirror Lake in Lake Placid in 1980 when Eric Heiden received his fifth gold medal for speed skating. It didn't occur to me to use the term that he had "medaled" at that historic moment, and just a thousand feet away the USA Olympic Hockey team was making history as well. They "won the Gold Medal" to the delight of millions of Americans. I never experienced the urge to exclaim that they had "medaled."
So it would seem that these two words have squeezed their way into the common lexicon of sports announcers, journalists, and others who discuss the Olympics. You will find me conversating about it without using those two words.
GraphCredit: http://pronunciationmatters.blogspot.com/2009/10/verb-or-noun.htmlic
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